Back when I was teaching full time, I only had about a 25 minute (if I was lucky) lunch break. Grabbing a frozen meal as I walked out the door in the mornings was a no-brainer – it didn’t require any effort or forethought on my part, and it heated up quickly.

To help my conscience out, I figured that if I was going to eat a frozen meal, at least I could make it diet. Then, I became aware of the high amounts of sodium in those meals. So, I decided to only eat them every once in a while. But, lately, I’ve been trying to make better (read: more whole foods, or at least as few processed foods as I can stand to get away with) choices for myself and my family. So making my own freezer meals (and trying to make them as low in calories/carbs/fats as possible) seemed like the next natural step.

One of my favorite freezer meals was Santa Fe Beans and Rice by Smart Ones. It didn’t take long to find a recipe for it that I wanted to try. It was delicious – so much better than the frozen one – and it didn’t take long for me to have 8 diet friendly lunches in my freezer ready to go.

Dumb question…do you mean 2 cups of cooked brown rice, or measure 2 cups of rice then cook? That is how it reads (according to the way I’ve been taught to read a recipe…;) but from the amt. for each serving, I suspect it’s two cups of cooked brown rice? Whew, couldn’t figure out how to say that in fewer words LOL

Hi Heather, thanks for this recipe, it’s on my cooking list for today! Here in Brussels I can find pintos more easily than black beans so I’m making it with that, plus some TVP (alas, not an unprocessed food) to up the protein content. The salsa will surely be the salsa posted on OAMM’s site this month. I’m going to picture the beautiful adobe architecture and old churches of Sante Fe when I eat this for lunch. Merci beaucoup / dank u wel!

Oops wanted to mention a thanks to Kathleen for her question on freezing an entire casserole, this will go into my stock of little single-serving size foil oven dishes. Every Friday night I crave a hot meal like lasagne, this is going to be it! Thanks for the vegetarian meal found over here. I’m bookmarking this one :)

Two thumbs way up for this recipe! Turns out that I couldn’t wait and made it in a large casserole instead of small ramekins (couldn’t find those). I’ll try it with zucchini/courgette in the next batch too.

This was the only WW meal I used to buy, *however* I’ve been forced to go low sodium so I haven’t eaten one in 10 months. But, while you talk about the bought version having high sodium in the introduction, the final counts are not given. Can you estimate the sodium count? Just curious. I’ll be using cooked dried black beans, frozen corn and no salt added tomato sauce myself, but I’m interested in the count using the ingredients you’ve listed. Thanks!